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Schumer to Democrats: Challenges Ahead

New York’s senior senator, Charles E. Schumer, was a chief architect — along with Representative Rahm Emanuel in the House — of the Democrats’ 2006 campaign strategy that helped lead to their take-back of Congress in November, persuading incumbent Democrats in red states not to retire; countering Karl Rove’s much ballyhooed Republican machine with a hefty war chest and aggressive on-the-ground tactics of their own; and perhaps most important, recruiting and backing candidates (like Jon Tester in Montana, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and James Webb in Virginia) who could compete in red-leaning states.

In the days after the election, Mr. Schumer cautioned his party against irrational exuberance, noting that the Democrats’ win was largely the result of Republican mistakes and the unpopularity of President Bush and the Iraq war, and warning that the party had a lot of work to do if it wanted to turn the ’06 results into a more lasting majority. In his provocative first book, “Positively American,” the senator amplifies these views while laying out a series of concrete proposals for winning back the middle class, from promoting college- tuition tax deductions to creating a kind of Manhattan Project for freeing the country from its dependence on fossil fuel.

Despite its cheesy red, white and blue cover and a hokey title that sounds like a line plucked from a campaign pamphlet, the book offers a smart, tough-minded appraisal of the Democratic Party’s weaknesses and challenges, addressing its current identity crisis, as well as many of the strategic and tactical disadvantages that political analysts like Thomas B. Edsall, Mark Halperin and John Harris have said the Democrats face in 2008 and the years to come.

At times, the volume seems to want to be a Democratic version of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” but unlike Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Schumer — who is now the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate — is not a polarizing bomb-thrower. For that matter, his book, much like his post-’80s record in the House and Senate (which includes helping to write the 1994 crime bill, spearheading passage of the Brady Bill, supporting the death penalty and calling for increased Homeland Security measures) is deliberately centrist: practical and pragmatic in tone, Clintonian in its willingness to mix up proposals traditionally labeled liberal or conservative, eager to use common sense to find common ground on issues like education and immigration.

This approach can lead to recommendations that fall into the category of the obvious — who doesn’t want to reduce cancer, childhood obesity and tax evasion? Who doesn’t want to protect children from pornography? — while circumventing big, messy, controversial issues like Social Security and national health care. But if “Positively American” doesn’t lay out a new, overarching paradigm for the Democrats, it does provide Mr. Schumer’s party with at least the beginnings of a credible blueprint for change and renewal.

Using a fictional suburban family named the Baileys (reminiscent, consciously or not, of the Bailey family in the classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”) to illustrate his points, Mr. Schumer writes that his party has made the mistake, in recent years, of forgetting the middle class: “We talked about them, but we didn’t listen to them. Even worse, we were under the illusion that they liked what we had to say. In the 2004 election, the middle class was the runaway bride, and Democrats were left standing at the altar.”

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Analyzing data from the Democrats’ 2004 loss, Mr. Schumer writes that “we were competitive among the middle class — voters with household incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 — only because of near unanimous support among middle class African-American voters” and that that support from “African-American voters at all economic levels has a lot more to do with three decades of the Republican Party’s exploiting white racism to win elections than it does with any great Democratic Party achievements.” Meanwhile, he notes, President Bush beat Senator John Kerry by 22 points among white, middle class voters, who represent a third of the electorate.

He adds that the Democrats’ bruising losses in 2004 were a byproduct of the party’s failure to offer a “comparable alternative” to the Republicans’ clearly articulated vision of a strong interventionist foreign policy, lower taxes and a conservative social-cultural agenda. While Mr. Schumer’s party prevailed in ’06, he says its message was essentially the “negative image of the Republican message” — it was largely reactive.

Mr. Schumer contends that the Republicans’ “ideological clock has run out,” but adds that the Democrats need to stop playing defense and define what their own party stands for if they want to consolidate last year’s victories. They need to learn from the Republicans, who are “incredibly skillful at identifying clear issues that connect to their values.” They need to come up with “a successful construct for how to deal with the war on terror.” They need to stop taking their cue in Washington from special-interest groups. And to counter the Republican media machine, they need to refine their message, create think tanks that will help shape the intellectual debate, and take advantage of “the extensive Democratic and left-leaning ‘netroots’ ” to help “identify and encourage viable candidates, like Jim Webb and Jon Tester, in the early stages of their races.”

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In the second part of this volume, Mr. Schumer proposes what he calls “the 50 percent solution” — for instance: “increase reading and math scores by 50 percent,” “reduce illegal immigration by at least 50 percent” and “increase our ability to fight terrorism by 50 percent.” Like the book’s title, this formulation not only feels like a glib, campaign sound bite, but it also does a disservice to the volume’s more thoughtful and detailed proposals for dealing with complex matters — like stemming the loss of American jobs to outsourcing and globalization by increasing federal education spending, and reducing American dependence on foreign oil in the short term by using means like drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, expanding the Energy Star appliance program and raising fuel-efficiency standards for cars.

Scattered here and there, between such wonky ruminations on legislative policy, are some lively personal asides about Mr. Schumer’s campaigns — most notably his successful underdog Senate race to unseat Alfonse D’Amato in 1998. These passages give the reader a glimpse of the grueling, decidedly unglamorous schedule of a politician, and the author’s dogged approach to his job: Mr. Schumer, then a relative unknown running in the 1998 Democratic primary against Geraldine Ferraro and Mark Green, sitting in his political consultant’s office closet, making endless phone calls to potential supporters; Mr. Schumer, the day after his primary victory, getting the pilot of the one-engine prop plane his campaign had hired to fly low so that his cellphone would work and he could call Ms. Ferraro and Mr. Green’s top donors; Mr. Schumer staying in $29 rooms at Motel 6’s during that ’98 race to save money and buttonhole voters as they checked out in the morning.

Along the way, Mr. Schumer describes two tests for the prospects of any political campaign: “If you are able to talk about the things you want to talk about, and if the news coverage reflects those things, you’ll win. If the coverage is about other things — maybe an opponent’s attack, maybe a self-inflicted gaffe or maybe an unexpected event — you’ll probably lose.”

And: “If you do everything right, and your opponent does everything right, who will win? If it’s you, that means the race is in your hands.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E37 of the New York edition with the headline: Schumer To Democrats: Challenges Ahead. Today's Paper|Subscribe